Stolen Dreams

by Christine Amsden

  “Yes. I know… I know Dad always thought my life would never be complete without it, but he was wrong.”

  “I’ll work with him,” Nicolas said, “but I can’t make any promises.”

  My heart leapt despite his warning. “No promises.” It was a start.

  32

  SOMETHING WAS BOTHERING ME: A COINCIDENCE. I hate coincidences. So after making sure that Evan and Nicolas weren’t going to kill one another, I put my developing plan to talk to Jason into motion.

  Deciding it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, I didn’t tell Evan about my plans. I knew what he would say; he had already made that as clear as the crystals he refused to energize. Good thing he wasn’t my only source of magic. Good thing Nicolas didn’t think to ask questions when I caught him during a short break from his work. Impatient to get back to his dark tomes, he probably would have refused if I hadn’t made it clear that the quickest path lay in doing as I asked.

  I made my move on Sunday afternoon, after spending the morning drinking holy water, just in case. I left the fire-starting potion at home–I hadn’t been carrying it around as much since it had nearly killed me. I planned to look into a way to protect myself from my own potions, but it wasn’t high on my to-do list.

  I set my trap before dawn, carefully arranging five crystals near one of the windows where I often saw Jason. When I placed them in precisely the right configuration–that of a pentagram–they created a force field that even a vampire would have trouble escaping. No one could get in or out, and only someone on the outside could move the crystals.

  I found the right configuration and watched in satisfaction as it powered up. Then I moved one of the crystals, breaking the field, but carefully marking its precise location so I wouldn’t waste time putting it in place when Jason moved into position.

  Then came the part I was particularly proud of. I had been working on it for months, inspired by the sheer number of times I had seen invisibility used to good effect over the last year, and now it was finished–a rune of invisibility. It used the same principles as the shield runes I used, and once activated could work for hours.

  Jason blurred onto the scene near mid-morning, first stopping behind a tree, then looking into Kaitlin’s bedroom window. She wasn’t there. If he wanted to see her, he would have to go to the living room window where I’d set the trap.

  I held my breath. I couldn’t see much of Jason as he sped around the house, trying to find a good spot to play Peeping Tom, but then, finally, he landed outside the living room window.

  There was just one problem. One of his feet was halfway outside the pentagram. I knelt to place the final crystal before I spotted the trouble, then I paused, not sure what to do. Mentally, I willed him to shift slightly, but I’m hardly a mind mage, and wishful thoughts rarely bear fruit.

  Finally, I cleared my throat, hoping that any reaction from him might cause him to shift his position. He stiffened, whirled in search of the noise, and he brought his foot squarely into my trap.

  I set the last crystal in place on a burst of quiet triumph. The field went up, and Jason roared.

  I fell backward, scrambling in a sort of crab walk until I was several feet away from him. I hadn’t expected the roar, nor had I expected the feral yellow eyes that showed me, quite clearly, my worst fears come true. He had turned. He was a vampire, no longer alive and no longer possessed of his soul.

  “Oh Jason,” I whispered. “Why couldn’t you have held out a few more days? I could have helped.”

  If he heard me, he didn’t show it. He only bellowed his rage and pain, and in his eyes I saw just one thing: hunger.

  Scrambling backward, I rose to my feet, clutching the cross around my neck for moral support. I still had questions, but could he understand or had the hunger driven him insane? With some vampires, it did. I could only try.

  “Jason, we need to talk.”

  He snarled and hissed, his eyes fixing unerringly on me, his fangs extended in malevolent hunger.

  “What are you?” I asked him, not expecting an answer. “Is there any part of Jason left inside?”

  Vampires had always been presented to me as pure evil, something to be feared and exterminated–preferably by someone stronger and more experienced than me. Call a hunter, my parents used to say. Now I had a hunter, and he had turned.

  The year before, I had come face to face with several vampires, none of which had changed my attitude that a vampire was anything less than a monster to exterminate. But I also knew, thanks to Frank Lloyd, that the high-functioning vampires were not ravening beasts. They could think, reason, and hide. They could have agendas beyond feeding. Which isn’t to say that I wanted anything to do with them, but it did give me hope that the thing that had once been Jason could listen and understand.

  “Jason,” I repeated, when my first attempt at communication had failed. “When did you turn?”

  “Yesterday,” came a smooth baritone from directly behind me, so deep it made me tremble, and so close it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I reached for the holy water at my side, but there was already a hand there, tearing the gun from its holster and tossing it aside. The same hand ripped away my belt, tossing it aside as well.

  Xavier. I knew without looking that it was he. This was precisely what Evan had feared.

  Evan! I hadn’t been so foolish as to come without his special crystal. It was tucked safely into my pocket, and even as I thought of him, the fragment warmed.

  Xavier circled around to face me. His eyes weren’t feral–he wasn’t in the throes of bloodlust–but this was small comfort to me.

  “I could have sworn I warned you to stay away,” Xavier said.

  “I had to talk to Jason.” I hoped my knees wouldn’t give out on me. “It’s about his father.”

  Xavier didn’t look impressed. “I finally convinced Jason to let me turn him. Now he needs to feed.”

  An icy chill shot down my spine. The first kill was usually lethal. Everyone knew that. “And he came to see Kaitlin?”

  “He wanted to turn her,” Xavier said. “So it seemed like a good idea to me.”

  “It won’t work. She’s taken the anti-venom potion.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about it to him, but he had to know about it, if he had turned Jason.

  Xavier apparently had heard, but hadn’t guessed that Kaitlin had taken it. His eyes went a little paler, almost yellow, and I took a step back. Not that the distance would help me if Xavier decided to attack.

  “He said she wasn’t a witch.”

  “My family has been taking care of her for months.”

  “That does complicate matters. The first kill is almost always lethal. Jason is a bit caught up in the bloodlust now, but he would be upset if the woman died.” Xavier eyed me in a way that made me shiver yet again.

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’ve been drinking holy water.”

  “What a waste,” Xavier said, “since I have to kill you anyway. Would have been convenient if he could have fed off you as well.”

  “Why do you have to kill me?” Was that my squeaky voice? “He’s turned. There’s nothing I can do about it now. So how about if we just pretend this never happened?”

  Xavier gestured at Jason, still trapped behind the force field. “It really was a brilliant trap. Jason’s told me a little bit about you and the people in your life. I’ve spent nearly nine months trying to keep Jason away from anyone who might help him, I can’t have you spoiling all that effort now that I’ve finally convinced him to turn.”

  “Spoil things?” My voice still sounded squeaky. “That’s ridiculous. I just wanted to talk to Jason.”

  Xavier glanced at Jason, who had calmed somewhat, but who still stared at us with intensely yellow eyes. “He’s not really in a talking mood right now. Won’t be until after his first kill.”

  “Oh, well in that case, I’ll just give him a call later on. No need for me to mess anything up. I’ll just move a
long.”

  Xavier smiled, showing fangs. “You want to leave without satisfying your curiosity?”

  No, but I did want to leave without dying. “I can see you’re busy.”

  “Not really,” Xavier said. “My only plans for the day are killing you and feeding him. And actually, if I wait about four hours I think all the holy water will be gone from your system and we can do both together after all.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I hate leaving bodies everywhere. It attracts attention. Will be bad enough leaving yours, with your connections, but I’ll survive. I have before.”

  I had no idea what to say to that, but maybe four hours would be enough time for me to figure a way out of this mess. Four hours would definitely be enough time for Evan to notice the crystal’s activation. Would he come alone or bring back up?

  “Not here, I think.” Xavier looked around. “Too public.”

  With that, he walked over to my carefully constructed cage and kicked one of the crystals aside. As quick as a flash, Jason was out and on me, knocking me to the ground and leaning over me with his much bigger, much heavier weight.

  I tried to scream, but it ended up as a choked little sound, muffled by the constriction in my lungs. In my mind, I relived another vampire attack from nine months earlier. I could feel the razor-sharp teeth biting into my flesh….

  “Jason, stop.” Xavier’s words had some kind of magical effect on Jason because he did, in fact, stop. “Poison, Jason. Poison.”

  Jason withdrew slightly, but his face still hovered inches above mine, his fangs still bared, and as I watched, a long stream of saliva dripped onto my neck.

  Maybe that’s when it hit me that this wasn’t Jason anymore. He looked so much like Jason that it was easy to forget, to remember the way he had been. He had saved my life once, and another time had been cool enough to stay quietly in the background to give me the chance to save myself. A couple of weeks ago, he had held his newborn baby in his arms, looking so lost and forlorn, and I had been so wrapped up in my own problems that I hadn’t reached out to him in time.

  “I’m so sorry, Jason,” I found myself saying.

  Feral yellow eyes stared down at me, without the tiniest hint of the man he had once been behind them. All that remained was hunger, and I was food.

  “Stand back,” Xavier said. “I need to make sure she’s not hiding any other weapons on her body.”

  Oh no. The crystal. It wasn’t a weapon, but it was a beacon, one that would broadcast my location even if Xavier had another way to block scrying spells. I wouldn’t underestimate him, so I had to assume he did.

  I backed away, but I may as well have been an infant for all the difficulty Xavier had catching and holding me. I writhed, my movements as useless as a declawed kitten’s, and before long, he had the crystal.

  “Sneaky.” Xavier tossed the crystal aside, near the potion belt. “He won’t find you once we get you to our safe house, though. Jason, pick her up.”

  I didn’t even try to resist when Jason threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, perhaps thinking that if I remained docile, he would be less likely to attack. I didn’t entirely understand what kept his hunger at bay now, but it was definitely hanging by a thin thread.

  After that, the world was a blur. I knew vampires could move fast, but I never imagined what it would be like to be held by one as it went from 0 to 60 in about a millisecond, and then kept accelerating. At some point, the g-forces knocked me out cold, which struck me, in retrospect, as a blessing in disguise.

  I came to. I suppose that’s obvious, but at the time it surprised me. If the g-forces hadn’t killed me, I was half convinced Xavier would have done so by now. Maybe he was serious about saving me for Jason’s dinner.

  I roused on a futon in one corner of a studio apartment. The place had no sense of permanence at all. The kitchen might never have been used, and the only furniture in the living room was the futon, folded out into a bed.

  “Go take the edge off,” Xavier was saying from somewhere near the small kitchen.

  Jason must have known what that meant because he thrust open the refrigerator and withdrew a bag of donor blood. I barely had time to register all this before Jason had the bag drained and, licking his lips, stared mournfully at it as though hoping for more. When he looked up, however; his eyes were less yellow. There was almost a hint of the original gray.

  “Why can’t he just drink the donor blood?” I asked. “Why does he have to kill anyone?”

  Judging by the look Xavier gave me, I might just have asked him why fire hurts when you touch it. “Being a vampire isn’t about drinking blood. It’s about the hunt.”

  Jason strode back into the living room and this time, when his eyes fell upon me, I saw a spark of recognition there. “Hi, Cassie.”

  “Hi Jas–” I stopped, wondering whether enough of Jason remained for me to call him that.

  “It’s still me,” he said. “I still remember everything. I saved your life once.”

  “Will you end it today?” I asked.

  Jason’s eyes narrowed, and he swung his gaze to Xavier. “What’s going on? We agreed I’d take Kaitlin so we could be together.”

  “Slight change of plans,” Xavier said. “Turns out Kaitlin’s on the potion, so if you took her now, you’d just kill her. Thought that might bother you.”

  “Damn right it would. I’d rather not kill Cassie either, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Do I get a vote?” I asked. “Because if so, I’m with Jason.”

  “She won’t let you take her friend,” Xavier said. “If we leave her alive, she will cause trouble for us.”

  Jason frowned. “Yeah, probably.”

  “You can’t hold out forever either,” Xavier said. “My control over you is slipping. You’ve got maybe 24 to 48 hours before donor blood won’t cut it anymore.”

  “Do you still have some of that potion you used to counteract the anti-venom potion?” Jason asked. “I can force Kaitlin to take it.”

  “She’ll never forgive you,” I cut in. “Vampire or not, she’d hate you for forcing her.”

  Xavier showed me his fangs, which I assume was supposed to be an approving smile. “I agree. That’s why I didn’t force you, Jason.”

  Jason growled. “You did the next best thing and we both know it.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “Jason, why’d you do it? Why did you turn? You still had your family. We still would have helped with whatever it was.”

  A shadow passed across Jason’s face, and in that expression I saw a glimpse of the Jason I had once known. What part of him remained? The old Jason had warned me against trusting vampires, had indeed warned me against himself the next time we met, but this new Jason didn’t seem to want to kill me. I didn’t take that to mean I was out of danger, but I did relax my guard somewhat. Now I wanted the truth. It might be too late to help him, but I still wanted to understand what had driven a dedicated hunter of vampires to become one himself.

  “Jason and some of his friends decided to attack me last June,” Xavier said. “They sent an entire heptade against me; I suppose I should have felt honored.”

  Jason turned to face the wall, as if he didn’t want to hear the story.

  “They underestimated me,” Xavier said. “I’ve known too many hunters in my time. Have turned a number of them. Worked alongside others.”

  “Worked alongside them?” I echoed.

  “Of course,” Xavier said. “No one’s more dedicated to seeing the vampire population put under strict controls than I am. It’s hard work. The youngest generation of vampires is almost always reckless. Don’t understand that not everyone they kill can turn. The first time a vampire hunts, it’s almost always fatal. Later, they learn control. Later, they learn to take less and leave the victims alive. But that first time they kill, and they either have to be intelligent enough to stop the corpse from turning, or else have a master who is.”

  “Are you Jason’s m
aster?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you turn him?” I asked.

  “He’s family.” Xavier showed me his fangs again. “I recognized him when he attacked, and I spared him. I don’t think he appreciated it though.”

  Jason turned his head to bare his fangs at his master, then continued looking out the window.

  “He’s your nephew,” I said, remembering what Xavier had told me. “That’s what has me curious. Aren’t you about two hundred years old?”

  “This body was born in 1804,” Xavier confirmed.

  “Your brother isn’t a vampire,” I said. “Vampires can’t have children. So how is he still alive?”

  “His body died long ago.”

  I caught my breath, going utterly still. This was it. This was the connection I had been striving to make. “And his soul?”

  “My brother was jealous when I became immortal,” Xavier said. “He decided he wanted it too, but I wouldn’t turn him. No one in my clan would. I did offer to kill him.” Xavier paused, reflecting on the memory as if in fondness. “He turned me down. He’s been body hopping for centuries. He likes to have as many sons as he can, because he gets the best results with those bodies. If he tries to possess an unrelated body, it ages quickly.”

  Tyler’s body had been shriveled and decayed, almost as if he had died from old age.

  “His last body wasn’t all that fertile. He only had Jason here, and his mother ran away with him.”

  “He can’t possess a vampire body,” Jason said, speaking for the first time. “I don’t have a soul for him to swap.”

  “What about your son?” I asked.

  “Too young,” Jason replied. “Wouldn’t work. His body has to have time to mature. Gives me about thirteen years to hunt my father down and kill him, and in the meantime, he won’t have a stable body to use. He’ll leave a trail of shriveled up husks I’m hoping to find and follow.”

  “You couldn’t have done this as a human?” I asked.